NHS must make better pay for nurses a priority

HOSPITAL consultants and general practitioners have been showered with riches by this Government in the form of lavish new contracts.

PUBLISHED: 00:00, Thu, Jun 7, 2007

Nurses need to be valued

While doctors’ representatives are moaning about low morale, it is nurses who must contemplate another modest pay deal being handed over in slow-motion instalments.

Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt is foolish and insensitive to brag about the £510million surplus generated by the NHS in 2006/7.

It is understandable that nurses should ask why some of it cannot be used to speed up their pay settlement. But things are not so simple. For a start, many NHS trusts desperately needed to build up reserves after allowing financial controls to slip disastrously over several years. Meanwhile, more than a fifth of trusts still cannot balance their books.

There is no magic pot of money available to top up nurses’ pay and despite major job losses over the past year, the NHS is still not in good financial shape. There will be a difficult legacy to confront for whoever takes over the health brief once Gordon Brown becomes Prime Minister and sacks the risible Ms Hewitt.

One of the first acts of the new minister should be to make it clear that in future the pay and conditions of nurses will take a higher priority than that of doctors.

While junior doctors have genuine cause for complaint over the mess the Government has made of their appointments system, their elders would be well advised to pipe down. They have never had it so good and the public is rightly on the side of the angels now.